Between life and deaf

Our lives are so dominated by music. When we wake up, it is the television that fills up the room or the radio that chatters in the background. When we drive in our cars we create a soundtrack to our lives. There is music in elevators.

Why is there this incessant need for us to have music around us? Most people even have cellphones with incredibly large storage capacity to carry most of their music collection with them. Is it then us that define which music we listen to or is it in fact that our music defines us?

I once had the unfortunate mishap of having earwax block my one ear for almost a day. Stereo hearing, the blessing that it is, was designed for a reason. Having only one ear to hear took the depth out of the hearing experience.I couldn’t judge the direction from which sounds were coming.

I had lost the joy of hearing. But imagine having no ears at all! An endless silence in which you cannot even hear your own breath. A blessing, maybe. Never to hear nasty remarks, gossip or verbal abuse. I could live with that. Would it be such a compromise to live without sound? What about losing all visual perception. I can’t decide which is better or worse.